The Last Pier Part 31

'He's waiting to see if Rose goes out.'

'I'm going to bed,' Tom said.

'We're tired,' Cecily told her mother, ignoring Pinky.

A preoccupied Agnes accepted this flawed story.

'Did you see his black file?' Tom asked as they parted on the stairs. 'He's trying to recruit your mother, make her a spy, like him.'

'Tonight's the night,' Cecily agreed. 'When the fish will bite!'

They synchronised their watches and went their separate ways.

September the 3rd, 1939; it might as well have been etched on her own headstone in gold letters.

Afterwards Agnes blamed herself for drinking too much champagne. But hindsight was still some hours away as Robert Wilson poured her another gla.s.s of fizzing, bubbling trouble.

'He had salt and pepper hair,' she said of Selwyn.

And he had remarked on her eyes.

For a love-starved girl who had only lived for Liszt, this was a thrill like no other.

'And Kitty?'

'Oh she was always prettier than me,' Agnes said, misunderstanding.

Robert Wilson refrained from comment.

'I don't want you to think it was all bad,' Agnes said.

'No.'

'We got on very well to start with.'

She paused, thinking through the jungle of missed opportunities.

'He used to make me laugh...'

Ah! thought Robert. Yes!

'And he loved my music.'

She remembered how in the early days they had had little concerts. How Joe in his pram had grown up listening to Beethoven and Mozart and Schubert. Getting his musical education from the cradle, Selwyn had said. As indeed Rose had, too.

'Until it all changed.'

'How?' Robert asked, his voice gentle.

Agnes hesitated. When had she realised?

'What?' asked Robert Wilson.

'His bitterness.'

'Bitterness?'

Again Agnes hesitated. How could a man like Robert Wilson understand?

'It hasn't been easy for me either,' Robert said, slowly.

There was a pause.

'His father was a terrible man,' Agnes said at last. 'Selwyn never forgave him for what he did to him.'

Something to do with a German girl he had been friendly with.

'Yes...'

'And of course there was also his brother's death...'

'Yes.'

'He closed his mind to everything except C. He loves her with a pa.s.sion that makes Rose resent him.'

'Why have favourites?' asked Robert Wilson, surprised.

Agnes shrugged.

'When Selwyn has an obsession, he doesn't give it up easily,' she said. 'When the job offer came he could not refuse. So I took over the running of the farm. Bit by bit, you know.'

Bit by bit Selwyn staying away, going up to London early, returning late.

'In the end we thought it sensible to buy a small flat. So he wouldn't have to keep driving back at all sorts of unearthly hours.'

'Did you stay there too?'

'Oh goodness, no. There was no room and besides I had the farm and the children to take care of. We thought it a good investment.'

'Where did the money come from?'

'His work at the Ministry,' she shrugged. 'It was well paid. He was an advisor to the Minister of Trade.'

Robert Wilson nodded. This wasn't news, he said. Then he held the empty bottle up to the light. And opened a new bottle.

'My word!' laughed Agnes, uneasily. 'We shall be drunk.'

But the day had been terrible enough, she supposed. She thought with longing about Lucio. He would come only under cover of the blackout. She was certain. Crossing the fields, the long way round. Bubbles of happiness rose in her.

'Agnes,' Robert Wilson said, at last.

And he stopped. They sipped their champagne in silence.

'Have you any idea what work Selwyn is doing now?'

'Well of course not, it's top secret,' she giggled.

She was beginning to sound like Tom, she thought. Robert Wilson was looking at her gravely.

'He doesn't talk to you about it?'

Agnes shook her head.

'Oh you needn't worry, Robert. Selwyn isn't in any special danger I promise you.'

There was a pause.

'How well d'you know the Italians?' Robert asked, gently.

'The Molinellos? They're wonderful people. Why?'

'No reason, but now we are at war and...'

'They won't be able to visit their relatives, poor things.'

It would hit Mario hard, she told him. He was often homesick.

'I'll visit them in the morning. After all, we're going to be related, soon!'

Robert nodded.

'I'm worried about them,' he said, slowly. 'We have to be careful of careless talk. From now on.'

'Oh I know,' Agnes told him, giggling again.

'I think you should keep an eye open,' he said, vaguely.

Then he rose.

'I should go to bed. Tomorrow all h.e.l.l will be let loose. In all probability, I'll have to return to London.'

Picking up the file he had brought with him, he opened it, and then changed his mind and shut it again, noticing how Agnes glanced at her watch. She had looked at it several times during the evening. He wondered if she was expecting someone, later. He wished her goodnight. And stepped outside. He did not see Tom with a jam jar, slipping across to the orchard in search of glow-worms. He did not see, and neither did Agnes, Rose climbing down the honeysuckle wearing her best satin shoes.

With a torch covered with two layers of black crepe paper, making for the bicycle shed.

But Cecily could see it now. Every bit of it. She could not stop seeing the image of Agnes crying out that she would take to her grave the x-ray of her daughter's teeth. Small, pearly, even, white teeth, held up to the light by the dentist.

Oh yes, it was Rose's all right.

Rose's teeth without its smile.

Teeth without the mouth that ranted at the world at large.

And a dress burnt to a cinder.

Cinders? (Cecily would murmur out of habit later on, ensuring a slap) Like Cinderella?

Without the gla.s.s slipper.

Someone (it was forgotten in the cacophony of sounds whether it had been Kitty) would be unable to stop slapping Cecily.

Shut up! Shut Up! Haven't you done enough damage already? With your stupid games, your foolish imagination? Will you never learn to shut up?

Stop, stop, stop! someone would cry, pulling Kitty's hands apart as though they were a bunch of cut flowers. Reminding everyone of the seven flowers Robert Wilson sent as a sign every time he wanted a secret word with Kitty.

Cecily had heard them tell Agnes it would not be advisable for her to see the rest of her daughter, Rose. Cecily had no idea who the devil they were. Even now, years later, she could not remember their faces, or their names; those people who lined up to hold her mother upright.

And Agnes Maudsley never forgave herself for listening with horror to the news of the first British ship to go down in the middle of the Atlantic at the same moment that her own daughter was going up in flames.

Twenty-nine years later, draining her cold tea into the dark-stained sink, Cecily washed up her mug. She realised she did not want to visit the grave.

ON HER LAST visit, when Cecily was almost nineteen, Agnes broke a silence of a different sort.

'At least she never knew what was to follow,' she said.

Sick, sad, quietly mad Agnes who visited Cecily for one last time, climbing up the steps to the front door, ringing the bell marked Maudsley. Out of breath, with a rattle in her chest and years of neglect imprinted on her eyes, bursting in on Cecily with random thoughts that were beyond comprehension.

'We've breached the ordered peace we once had,' she announced and Cecily, tired of her mother's evasive lies, her refusal to tell her what had really gone on, the guilt of all she herself was carrying, closed her eyes and sighed.

Leave me alone, she wanted to cry. None of this is relevant.

But although on the edge of extinction, Agnes was unable to stop sifting the stones of confusion that would fill her life until it reached its bitter end.

So on that last visit she had thrust a small cutting from The Times into Cecily's hand, insisting she read of the boat the Italians had sailed on. Before the war it had been a luxury cruise liner floating across the Mediterranean.

The British liner Arandora Star, with about 1,500 Germans and Italian subjects on board, has been torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat in the Atlantic. Germans and Italians, men interned at the outbreak of war, were being taken to Canada. It is feared that all Italian lives have been lost. British survivors state that as the ship was rapidly sinking there was panic amongst the aliens, and especially amongst the Germans, who thrust aside Italians in their efforts to reach the lifeboats first.

'He loved me, you know,' Agnes burst out. 'Lucio! And now he's gone.'

'And the other Molinellos?' Cecily had asked, unable to ask more.